Brighten up Your Day – Add Color to IntelliJ IDEA!

For a long time, IntelliJ IDEA came only in black and white, with developers advocating for customization tirelessly. Today we have exciting news for you: IntelliJ IDEA 2019.1 will become more flexible than ever thanks to Custom Themes!

Now you will have the power to design your own theme from scratch, and even better, we’ve made this incredibly easy to do!

We’ve created a few brand new themes to get you started. Add more color to your IDE right away by downloading one of the following new themes and selecting it as your new Theme in the Appearance settings!

We’ve made significant changes in our codebase so that you can tweak the entire IDE appearance, including icon colors, radio buttons, arrows, the color scheme, and everything else you can think of. You can literally change the color of anything!

Each theme is actually a theme plugin that you can download directly from our plugin repository. Or, if you feel up to it, you can create your own theme plugin using the DevKit and modify the IDE appearance via the JSON file. It really is as simple as that.

This major change affects our IntelliJ Platform which means that all IntelliJ-based IDEs will have this new ability in v2019.1. That includes IntelliJ IDEA, PhpStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine, WebStorm, DataGrip, GoLand, CLion, AppCode, and Rider.

Brighter theme? Low-contrast theme? Fun new theme? A theme that just rocks? Develop your own theme for your IDE! Then share it with the community for everyone to enjoy – by uploading it to our plugin repository!

Hi Darrel,
Each theme is actually a theme plugin. You need to install it at first and after that, you will be able to select it from the Appearance settings.
Step 1. Go to Settings/Preferences | Plugins and install Dark Purple theme plugin.
Step 2. Restart the IDE.
Step 3. Go to Settings/Preferences | Appearance & Behavior and select Dark Purple theme from the drop-down list of the theme options.

Tried to install Grey Theme from plugin registry.
– It didn’t show up in a list of themes in Settings/Preferences | Appearance & Behavior
– It disappeared from the marketplace
– it’s not in the list of installed plugins

You have to go to Plugins and then install from disk the jar file that you downloaded beforehand from this site.
Then you have to restart your IDE.
After that you can select it in the apperance section.

Why is this such a hard thing to accomplish…. ugh.
I have the latest version 2019.3 and running on linux. When I try to install via the plugins section as a jar, says “Plugin Dark Purple Theme is incompatible with this installation”
Also tried import settings and its rejecting the file.

I created a Solarized Dark and Light theme! Please come help me improve it. It currently only needs a few more touches here and there. (It hasn’t been approved on the plugins repo yet, but that won’t happen until Monday at the earliest).